God waited for Mary’s consent, Mary: Day 202

Last updated on: February 8, 2016 at 3:30 am by Pete Socks

God waited for Mary’s consent, Mary: Day 202 2016-01-01T15:07:11-05:00 Pete Socks

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God waited for Mary’s consent

When Gabriel announced that Mary had been chosen to bear God’s Son, did she really have a choice in the matter? Fr. Frederick W. Faber considers the matter.

Mary’s created spirit was busied in adoration when the Uncreated came, and took his Flesh and Blood, and dwelt within her. Yet his coming was not abrupt. He sent his messenger before he came himself.

But what is the special purpose for which the messenger has come? To ask in the name of God for Mary’s consent to the Incarnation. The Creator will not act in this great mystery without his creature’s free consent. Her freedom shall be a glorious reflection of his own ineffable freedom in the act of creation.

The Omnipotent stands on ceremony with his feeble, finite creature. He has already raised her too high to be only a blind instrument. Moreover, the honor of his own assumption of a created nature has an interest in the liberty in which creation will grant him what he requires. He would not come claiming his rights
or using his prerogatives.

It was an awful moment. It was fully in Mary’s power to have refused. Impossible as the consequences seem to make it, the matter was with her, and never did a free creature exercise its freedom more freely than she did that night.

How the angels must have hung over the moment! With what adorable delight and unspeakable satisfaction the Holy Trinity awaited the opening of her lips! It was the fiat of the one whom God had called out of nothingness, and whose own fiat was now to be music to his ears—creation’s echo to that fiat of his at whose irresistible sweetness creation itself sprang into being! —Fr. Frederick W. Faber, Bethlehem

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER . . .
Mary had a choice: to say yes to God, or to refuse him. We have the same choice, which we make many times, in many ways, every day. Which choice will I make today?

CLOSING PRAYER
Lord God, thank you for creating me with the great dignity of a free will, a will that is never more free than when it rests in your will. I kneel beside my Lady, and join my feeble fiat to hers: “Let it be done to me according to your word.”

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A Year with Mary

Father Frederick Faber

Paul Thigpen

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